Polly was a crumbled, weeping mess. Jimmy let her close early, and she and Ned walked down to Bayard for dumplings, and then to a bar on Crosby Street, and then to more and later food on Varick. He told her that he’d heard her name when friends were talking about a new place that spring, a few months after he’d arrived in the city from Dublin. He’d headed to the restaurant to see her, to confront her about the way they’d all abandoned him, to explain he’d taken his aunt and uncle’s name because he needed to give up everything about his life before the age of ten, to get away from the loss of Rita, Papa and Dee, and, of course, her. He wanted to walk in and witness the moment she recognized him, watch guilt flood over her face, but the shock of seeing her, the shock at realizing he might not have been able to recognize her without some foreknowledge, took him to silence, and dawning familiarity kept him there. His anger cracked off while he watched her move in the chaos behind the bar, and a blast of love followed, something like what he’d felt as a child but also fascination, and lust. If it had seemed like the old longing—Polly as lost family, lost childhood—he might have retreated, creeped out by his own motives. But he felt none of that, or resentment anymore. He just wanted to be with her.

And so he sold her cheeses, and held his tongue. He was sorry he hadn’t come out with it, but the longer he waited, the harder it was to imagine explaining. He didn’t want to lose her again and he did not know how to get past this moment, this horrible confusion of affections. He called his uncle and told him and said she was always my friend, not my sister. How could it be wrong to feel this way?

Ned’s uncle said that it depended on Polly, who at this point was next to Ned as they worked through a nightclub crowd on a sidewalk. He touched her shoulder and then her hip to steer her through and she felt like his hand burned her skin.

They looped around each other for hours, and she waited until he was asleep, facedown and stretched out in the warm apartment, to look at the scars on his shoulder, the kind a cat’s claws might make, the raised scar on the back of his leg, the kind of tear the bent metal of an old boat might make, if a boy had tried to tow it toward a beach and a waiting girl and a dead man.